Pelleting is the cooking of natural uranium fuel powder, at 1650 degrees centigrade, to form ceramic pellets that go into nuclear reactor fuel rods. 
The factory will process over 150 tonnes of uranium per month to provide fuel for half of all nuclear energy produced in Canada. 
The decision to allow nuclear fuel pellet production in the downtown core is being challenged in court by a local group called Citizens Against Radioactive Neighbourhoods (CARN) with the help of lawyers from the Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA). 
CARN alleges that the regulator unlawfully granted a ten-year licence to BWXT on the grounds that BWXT omitted details about the proposed operation’s physical design and environmental monitoring program which are required by the Nuclear Safety Control Act. 
Although lawyers for CELA will ask the court to declare the licence to pellet unlawful, it is very unlikely that there is an Erin Brockovichesque moment in the cards because they are essentially arguing on a technicality.
That technicality will conceivably force BWXT to reveal potentially damaging information about their plans for the Peterborough-Nogojiwanong site that they would not like the public to know.
The information will include where they will be positioning the stacks that release uranium into the air. 
In Toronto there are six stacks that release uranium into the air in all directions from the plant in a residential neighbourhood.  
A detailed site and environmental monitoring plan would reveal if they are intending to release alpha-radiation emitting uranium particles in the direction of the Prince of Wales School or just on the rest of the downtown. 
If required by the court, a detailed site plan may also reveal if BWXT is planning on moving the goal posts yet again to include working with highly radioactive enriched uranium to fuel a fleet of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs) currently in development. 
BWXT is a leader in developing SMNR technology in Canada backed by the federal government. In a January 2020 interview CARN representative Jane Scott said, “I am sure it is their plan to work with enriched uranium because Canada is investing a lot of money in small modular reactors which require enriched uranium.”
According to Scott, “we can see a lot of hits on our http://www.nopellets.ca website from places in the US where small modular reactor businesses are located, a company called NuScale wants to make small modular reactors in Canada and has partnerships with Ontario Power Generation, Bruce Power, and BWXT in the United States.”
Scott first got involved in the fight against BWXT (formerly General Electric-Hitachi Peterborough) in 2010 when Arthur broke a story on how the company had received permission in secret in 2009 to process enriched uranium without consulting the public.
BWXT has refused to rule out the possibility of working with enriched uranium.
In January 2020 I asked BWXT spokesperson Natalie Cutler the following question, “Can you guarantee local communities that you will never bring any enriched uranium on site in Toronto or Peterborough in the future?”
Cutler claimed “We have no plans to seek a change to our licence to allow us to process enriched uranium.”
For context, BWXT also claimed it had “no plans” to conduct pelleting in Peterborough-Nogojiwanong but were seeking the “flexibility” to conduct pelleting in Peterborough-Nogojiwanong “should the need arise.” 
According to Kerrie Blaise, the lawyer representing CARN, BWXT denied multiple requests to share their business plan with the public. 

Citing BWXT’s proximity to the Prince of Wales Elementary School, CARN media representative Bill Templeman suggests that if BWXT wanted to conduct pelleting outside of Peterborough on “unused land,” it wouldn’t be an issue.  
According to Trent Alum, Shaelyn Wabegijig, who is Algonquin Timiskaming First Nation Caribou Clan, German and Irish, the notion of “unused” land is a colonial concept rooted in the concept of “terra nullius” (no one’s land) and the Doctrine of Discovery which was used as justification for the colonial dispossession of sovereign Indigenous Nations.  
Wabegijig, who works as the Program and Outreach Coordinator at the Kawartha World Issues Centre (KWIC), says the members of CARN are “people who are speaking out and trying to protect our community from danger and disease.”
According to Wabegijig, the people living near the plant deserve “communication and transparency on their own terms to determine if they want this in their neighbourhood, and a stark majority say no.” 

DOE recently submitted a report to Congress on potential opportunities for different ways to treat waste now held at Hanford and other DOE nuclear sites.

The report was required three years ago by the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act to look at the feasibility, costs and cost savings of reclassifying high level radioactive waste to allow it to be treated and disposed of in ways not allowed for high level waste.
“Let’s trust the science and move forward,” said Washington state Sen. Sharon Brown, R-Richland, who has advocated for classifying some tank waste as low level waste to allow more efficient treatment.

The cost savings identified in the report “are a big step in the right direction, and would assist both DOE and its regulators in focusing on the mission of protecting those mist impacted — local citizens and tribal members,” said Richland Councilman Bob Thompson, chairman of Hanford Communities, a coalition of Hanford area local governments.
“We need the Hanford Site cleaned up, and I’m concerned that it will be very difficult to achieve given current cost estimates,” he said. “We should be exploring alternatives that can reduce costs and expedite the cleanup while maintaining safety and effectiveness.”
The latest cost estimate for the remaining environmental cleanup at the Hanford site, which was released two years ago, said taxpayers will need to spend $323 billion to $677 billion.
The 580-square-mile Hanford nuclear reservation in Eastern Washington was used from World War II through the Cold War to produce two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
But Hanford Challenge, a Seattle-based watchdog group, found the report “shocking,” said its executive director, Tom Carpenter.

The report discusses reclassifying up to 80% of the 56 million gallons of Hanford tank waste to allow it to be stabilized in a concrete-like grout form, rather than vitrifying, or glassifying it.
That could open the door to grouting waste in tanks rather than emptying the tanks, Carpenter said.

RECLASSIFYING WASTE

Any waste produced when fuel irradiated at Hanford reactors was chemically processed to remove plutonium is classified as high level radioactive waste under U.S. law.
But internationally, waste classification is based not on how waste is produced as it is for high level waste in the United States, but on its radiological risk.

“It makes sense to me that we would manage and treat Hanford’s waste based on its physical characteristics, rather than how it was produced,” said David Reeploeg, the Tri-City Development Council vice president for federal programs.
Already much of the tank waste at Hanford, while by definition is high level, is referred to as low activity radioactive waste and managed as it if is low level rather than high level waste by agreement between the state of Washington and the federal government.
In 2019, DOE adopted a new policy that allows it to reclassify radioactive waste if it determines it does not exceed certain radionuclide concentrations for low level waste or does not need to be disposed of in a deep geological repository, such as the one proposed at Yucca Mountain, Nev.
However, Congress has banned the new policy from being used in Washington state under the two most recent National Defense Authorization Acts.

High level waste can still be reclassified but under a more involved process that relies on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The new DOE report to Congress stresses that reclassifying tank waste for grouting is not a proposal, only a look at potential opportunities.
Before any action is taken DOE would need to gather more data, do more analyses and discuss the proposed change with those interested in Hanford, the report said.
GROUTING TANK WASTEThe report looks at the possibility of reclassifying much of the waste stored in underground tanks in part of central Hanford, the 200 West Area, and then grouting it for disposal rather than turning it into stable glass logs at the $17 billion vitrification plant under construction.

Hanford has 56 million gallons of radioactive waste stored in underground tanks, split between the 200 East Area and the 200 West Area, which are about seven miles apart.
The underground tanks include 149 single shell tanks which are prone to leaking. They are being emptied into 27 newer double-shell tanks for more secure storage until the waste can be treated for permanent disposal.
Most of the double-shell tanks — all but three — are in the 200 East Area.
In addition to the three double-shell tanks, the 200 West Area also has 83 of the Hanford site’s single-shell tanks, some of them with a capacity of 1 million gallons.
Grouting 80% of the 200 West Area tank waste would allow the waste to be treated in a less-complex, lower temperature and lower risk method, the DOE report said.

The vitrification plant heats waste and glass forming materials to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit to produce a stable glass form.
Some of the cost savings of grouting could come from not having to expand the vitrification plant, according to the DOE report.
The plant was never planned to be large enough to treat all of the low-activity tank waste at Hanford.
Grouting large amounts of the 200 West Area tank waste also could eliminate the need to replace or repair seven miles of cross-site transfer line, according to the report.
The pipe would move the waste from the 200 West Area to the 200 East Area for storage in double-shell tanks and treatment at the vitrification plant, which is in the 200 East Area.

Grouting the waste also could allow the waste to be sent off of Hanford for disposal, leaving less waste permanently disposed in the Eastern Washington nuclear reservation, the DOE report said.
Now the low-activity waste glassified at the vitrification plant is planned to be disposed of in a lined landfill in central Hanford.
But the state of Washington objects to waste being buried there unless it is vitrified or can be shown to be as protective of the environment as glass.
HANFORD GROUTING TESTDOE has grouted three gallons of radioactive waste in a test, using an engineered grout form that is protective of the environment, it said.

The waste was sent from Hanford to nearby Perma-Fix Environmental Solutions in Richland to be encapsulated in a specialized grout. It then was sent to a Waste Control Specialists disposal cell in Texas that was built for low-level radioactive waste from federal government sites.
Congress has already appropriated money to continue the demonstration of the grouting project on more waste, said Gary Petersen, president of Northwest Energy Associates, a nonprofit, Hanford advocacy group formed by Tri-Cities area business leaders.
He questions why the second phase of the test, which would involve grouting 2,000 gallons, has not started.
The 200 West tanks are a great place to demonstrate the grouting project because DOE currently does not seem to have a plan for treating the waste in tanks that is far from the vitrification plant, he said.

HANFORD CHALLENGE CONCERNS

However, Hanford Challenge is skeptical that it is practical to grout millions of gallons of waste and ship it off site, saying the more likely outcome of reclassifying so much tank waste would be to grout the waste within the tanks and leave it in the ground at Hanford.
The grout could fail within a matter of decades, he said, which would put more groundwater at Hanford at risk of contamination.
Although reclassifying tank waste is not currently allowed in Washington state, it is being used successfully already at DOE’s Savannah River, S.C., nuclear site, Brown pointed out.
The first use of DOE’s new reclassification policy resulted in eight gallons of recycled wastewater from vitrification at Savannah River being grouted and sent to the Waste Control Specialists repository in Texas.
Just as reclassification of waste was done at Savannah River, it “can be successfully utilized in a safe manner as well at Hanford,” Brown said.

Planet of the Humans, whose executive producer and chief promoter is Michael Moore, now has more than 6 million views on YouTube. The film does not deny climate science. But it promotes the discredited myths that deniers have used for years to justify their position. It claims that environmentalism is a self-seeking scam, doing immense harm to the living world while enriching a group of con artists. This has long been the most effective means by which denial – most of which has been funded by the fossil fuel industry – has been spread. Everyone hates a scammer.

And yes, there are scammers. There are real issues and real conflicts to be explored in seeking to prevent the collapse of our life support systems. But they are handled so clumsily and incoherently by this film that watching it is like seeing someone start a drunken brawl over a spilled pint, then lamping his friends when they try to restrain him. It stumbles so blindly into toxic issues that Moore, former champion of the underdog, unwittingly aligns himself with white supremacists and the extreme right.

Occasionally, the film lands a punch on the right nose. It is right to attack the burning of trees to make electricity. But when the film’s presenter and director, Jeff Gibbs, claims, “I found only one environmental leader willing to reject biomass and biofuels”, he can’t have been looking very far. Some people have been speaking out against them ever since they became a serious proposition (since 2004 in my case). Almost every environmental leader I know opposes the burning of fresh materials to generate power.

There are also some genuine and difficult problems with renewable energy, particularly the mining of the necessary materials. But the film’s attacks on solar and wind power rely on a series of blatant falsehoods. It claims that, in producing electricity from renewables, “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place”. This is flat wrong. On average, a solar panel generates 26 units of solar energy for every unit of fossil energy required to build and install it. For wind turbines the ratio is 44 to one.

Planet of the Humans also claims that you can’t reduce fossil fuel use through renewable energy: coal is instead being replaced by gas. Well, in the third quarter of 2019, renewables in the UK generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas plants put together. As a result of the switch to renewables in this country, the amount of fossil fuel used for power generation has halved since 2010. By 2025, the government forecasts, roughly half our electricity will come from renewables, while gas burning will drop by a further 40%. To hammer home its point, the film shows footage of a “large terminal to import natural gas from the United States” that “Germany just built”. Germany has no such terminal. The footage was shot in Turkey.

There is also a real story to be told about the co-option and capture of some environmental groups by the industries they should hold to account. A remarkable number of large conservation organisations take money from fossil fuel companies. This is a disgrace. But rather than pinning the blame where it lies, Planet of the Humans concentrates its attacks on Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, who takes no money from any of his campaigning work. It’s an almost comic exercise in misdirection, but unfortunately it has horrible, real-world consequences, as McKibben now faces even more threats and attacks than he confronted before.

But this is by no means the worst of it. The film offers only one concrete solution to our predicament: the most toxic of all possible answers. “We really have got to start dealing with the issue of population … without seeing some sort of major die-off in population, there’s no turning back.”

Yes, population growth does contribute to the pressures on the natural world. But while the global population is rising by 1% a year, consumption, until the pandemic, was rising at a steady 3%. High consumption is concentrated in countries where population growth is low. Where population growth is highest, consumption tends to be extremely low. Almost all the growth in numbers is in poor countries largely inhabited by black and brown people. When wealthy people, such as Moore and Gibbs, point to this issue without the necessary caveats, they are saying, in effect, “it’s not Us consuming, it’s Them breeding.” It’s not hard to see why the far right loves this film.

Population is where you go when you haven’t thought your argument through. Population is where you go when you don’t have the guts to face the structural, systemic causes of our predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism. Population is where you go when you want to kick down.

We have been here many times before. Dozens of films have spread falsehoods about environmental activists and ripped into green technologies, while letting fossil fuels off the hook. But never before have these attacks come from a famous campaigner for social justice, rubbing our faces in the dirt.

https://thebulletin.org/2020/04/how-nuclear-forces-worldwide-are-dealing-with-the-coronavirus-pandemic

Here are links to other articles about this issue:
Title: COVID-19 and the Doomsday Clock: Observations on managing global risk
Author: Bulletin Science and Security Board
Publication(s): Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Date: 15 April 2020
Link: https://thebulletin.org/2020/04/covid-19-and-the-doomsday-clock-observations-on-managing-global-risk/

Title: Another victim of the pandemic: trust in the government
Author: Macfarlane, Allison
Publication(s): Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Date: 13 April 2020
Link: https://thebulletin.org/2020/04/another-victim-of-the-pandemic-trust-in-the-government/

Specific deficiencies noted by the IAEA include:

Canada’s regulator is considering allowing future nuclear facilites (such as small modular reactors) and old radioactively contaminated nuclear reactors to be entombed and abandoned on site, a practice that is explicitly rejected by the IAEA;
The IAEA found “no evidence… of a governmental policy or strategy related to radioactive waste management”;
Canada’s nuclear legislation does not require justification of radiation risks from nuclear facilities; the IAEA says for nuclear facilities and activities to be considered justified, the benefits must be shown to outweigh the radiation risks to which they give rise;
Canada’s system for managing the transport of radioactive materials does not align with IAEA regulations;
There are problems in the ways that Canada authorizes radiation releases from nuclear facilities;
Canada’s current and proposed regulations don’t adequately protect pregnant workers, students, and apprentices from radiation risks; eg. they allow four times higher radiation doses for pregnant nuclear workers than IAEA standards.
“These deficiencies concern us very much,” said Dr. Éric Notebaert of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. “We feel strongly that Canada is failing to adequately protect Canadians from dangerous radioactive substances that are known to cause cancers, serious chronic diseases, birth defects, and genetic damage that is passed on to future generations.”

The letter to the Prime Minister points out that these gaps in Canada’s nuclear safety practices, identified by the IAEA and others, leaves Canada vulnerable to unwise decisions on investment in new nuclear technology.

“Canada’s rush to promote and invest in small modular nuclear reactors is ill-advised” said Dr. Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, “especially when these reactors have been exempted from environmental assessment. Such reactors will produce radioactive wastes of all varieties, yet there is no policy for their safe long-term disposition. With no need to “justify” the radiation exposures from such new reactors, entrepreneurs and provinces can proceed without any explicit consideration of faster, cheaper and lower risk energy alternatives to reduce carbon emissions.”

The letter also draws attention to nuclear governance problems cited in Environmental Petition 427 to the Auditor General of Canada. These include (1) outdated and inadequate legislation, (2) inadequate government oversight, (3) lack of checks and balances, (4) a federal policy vacuum on nuclear waste and nuclear reactor decommissioning, and (5) the problem of regulatory capture on the part of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
The authors of the letter support the recommendation in Petition 427 for the creation of a high-level, interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder task force to advise the government on the needed reforms to nuclear governance in Canada.

Contacts:
Dr. Gordon Edwards, Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility514-489-5118 cell: 514-839-7214 ccnr@web.ca
Dr. Ole Hendrickson, Ottawa River Institute613-234-0578 ole@nrtco.net

Links:
Letter to the Prime Minister, April 3, 2020:http://ccnr.org/Letter_Trudeau_03_04_2020_e.pdf

IAEA Report: https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/documents/review-missions/irrs_canada_2019_final_report.pdf

Environmental Petition 427 to the Auditor General of Canada, June 2019. Petition summary:https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/pet_427_e_43421.html Full text of petition: https://concernedcitizens.net/2019/11/30/environmental-petition-nuclear-governance-problems-in-canada”
Link: https://concernedcitizens.net/2020/04/08/groups-urge-trudeau-to-fix-serious-gaps-in-nuclear-safety-and-governance

2) How accurate is presently-used data in regards to the efficacy and power of the United States nuclear weapons fleet? I hope that nuclear weapons are never actually used, though it would be alarming to consider that some weapons may not work as intended, or may have inaccurate estimates as to their power.

3) Do other countries have similar errors in their nuclear weapons-related data?

The Seeker video on this project – linked below – alarmingly notes: “the U.S. detonated over 200 nuclear weapons to gather scientific data about their potential. That data was gospel for years, until a weapons physicist decades later found out the figures were off by huge margins.”

See also other comments on this website regarding other bomb components now aging past their lifespan – such as the aerogel FOGBANK – resulting in degradation of bomb and weapon components. Concerns were voiced in the late 2000s regarding manufacturing of the aerogel FOGBANK, as this compound is/was classified and many people who know how to make it have either died, were senile, and/or are retired. There were several articles a few years ago (pre 2007-2008) discussing concerns that the United States may not have all the relevant information to restart FOGBANK manufacturing programs. Los Alamos Laboratories in their Nuclear Weapons Journal [Issue 2, 2009] (linked below) discusses various challenges in the manufacturing of FOGBANK – which restarted in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

Archiving the nuclear test footage is important. However, it is alarming to consider that governmental discussions are oriented around modernizing nuclear weapons, rather than dismantling them.

Here are references to some articles and videos (arranged alphabetically by author’s surname / project name) discussing the nuclear weapons tests films preservation project:

How To Watch a Declassified Nuclear Test Film Like A Weapons Physicist
By Rachel Becker
The Verge, 13 May 2017
Link: https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/13/15633380/nuclear-test-film-declassified-weapons-physicist-watch

Title: Physicist Declassifies Rescued Nuclear Test Films
Author: O’Brien, Nolan
Publication(s): Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Date: 14 March 2017
Link: https://www.llnl.gov/news/physicist-declassifies-rescued-nuclear-test-films

Title: Declassified Nuclear Test Films Reveal Hidden Truths About Our Atomic Past
Author: Seeker
Publication(s): Seeker
Date: 3 August 2017
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-QVPXBcxLU

Title: Preserving the Past to Protect the Future
Author: Spriggs, Dr. Greg and Auten, Holly
Publication(s): Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Date: October/November 2017
Link: https://str.llnl.gov/october-2017/spriggs
Article Publication Link (Direct) : https://str.llnl.gov/content/pages/october-2017/pdf/10.17.1.pdf

FOGBANK-related articles:

Title: Did America Forget How To Make The H-Bomb?
Author: Baumann, Nick
Publication(s): Mother Jones
Date: 1 May 2009
Link: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/05/fogbank-america-forgot-how-make-nuclear-bombs/

Title: FOGBANK
Author: Lewis, Jeffrey
Publication(s): Arms Control Wonk
Date: 7 March 2008
Link: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/

Title: Fogbank: Lost Knowledge Regained
Author: Lillard, Jennifer
Publication(s): Nuclear Weapons Journal [Los Alamos National Laboratory] (2009 Edition, Issue 2, Pages 20-21)
Date: 2009
Link: https://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/wj_pubs/17nwj2_09.pdf

Title: Fogbank Is Mysterious Material Used in Nukes That’s So Secret Nobody Can Say What It Is
Author: Trevithick, Joseph
Publication(s): The Drive: The Warzone
Date: 3 April 2020
Link: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32867/fogbank-is-mysterious-material-used-in-nukes-thats-so-secret-nobody-can-say-what-it-is

Rachel Maddow additionally discusses how “no one today remembers the exact formula for making [FOGBANK]” on page 221 in Chapter 9 (called “An $8 Trillion Fungus Among Us”) in her book “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power” (2012). As such, FOGBANK has been a bit of a reverse engineering challenge. This chapter additionally discusses a few of the many maintenance-related challenges of the US nuclear weapons fleet, such as nuclear weapons’ external components simply falling apart from age. Maddow further notes corrosion and fungal growth on external components of nuclear missiles is a particular challenge for military bases in Louisiana, due to the humid and warm subtropical climate.

Apparently – according to Maddow – the engineering of some type of fuses for nuclear weapons was forgotten as well, as the old engineers who created them passed away before anyone thought to document the manufacturing process in detail. Another concern is that nuclear weapons may be undergoing unknown or unpredictable chemical reactions within their various components as they age. Stray vapours from an ICBM already caused an explosion in the 1980s – near the Ozarks in Arkansas. Could each nuclear weapon be a ticking, dirty, time bomb (even if not intentionally used)? Yikes.

An excerpt from Maddow’s chapter is available here: https://publicism.info/politics/drift/10.html

The Swiss decision to quit nuclear power was upheld in a 2017 referendum which also supported government plans to push forward sustainable energy with subsidies to develop solar, wind and hydroelectric power.

No dates have been set for the shutdown of Switzerland’s other nuclear power stations, although the Beznau plant near the German border, which dates back to 1969, is expected to be next.

As recently as 2017, Switzerland’s nuclear power stations generated a third of the country’s power, compared with around 60% from hydroelectric and 5% from renewable.

Muehleberg’s operator, the state-controlled energy company BKW, decided in October 2013 to shutter the plant, saying plans to invest in its long-term future were no longer viable.

Output has been winding down in the last few weeks as the final fuel loaded in the summer of 2018 was depleted.

After the shutdown, a 15-year decommissioning process will get under way, costing 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.06 billion). No plans have been agreed for how the site will be redeveloped.

Shutting down Muehleberg has generated mixed emotions.

“There is a lot of Swiss know-how in the power plant. Old valves, for example, which still come from (Swiss engineering company) Sulzer. A piece of factory and economic history is lost,” said one worker, who asked not to be named.

“It also hurts when we cut up everything that we have nurtured over the years.”

Anti-nuclear campaigners, however, hailed the move.

“Clearly, we welcome the decision to close the plant,” said Philippe de Rougement, president of the campaign group Sortir du Nucleaire. “We would have loved it to close much earlier.”

Switzerland’s use of nuclear energy had delayed its development of renewable energy sources, he said.

“Nuclear energy was a grave mistake for Switzerland. We have had the electricity, but the future generations will have to manage the toxic waste and they won’t thank us.””
Link: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-nuclearpower/switzerland-switches-off-nuclear-plant-as-it-begins-exit-from-atomic-power-idUSKBN1YO19J

For decades, the Sahtúgot’ine—Bear Lake people—had only heard rumours about where the pitchblende, or uranium, gleaned from their land ended up. In the 1990s, a meeting between the Dene and Gordon Edwards, co-founder of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, confirmed the deadly tie binding Port Radium to Hiroshima. Then an extraordinary thing happened. A Dene delegation got on a plane and went to Japan to offer the hibakusha—the bomb survivors—an apology.

In 2001, I learn that much of the uranium used in developing the atomic bombs dropped on Japan was from Great Bear Lake. This information comes from a colleague, Peter van Wyck, who wants to know if I’ll accompany him on a research trip. How would I like to follow the path of uranium from the Northwest Territories to New Mexico? I’ve always been attracted to catastrophic events: the fault lines in the psyche of a culture; the secrets that fester in families, leak quietly into communities and eventually—sometimes—explode. I work in theatre, so I decide to tell the story of Great Bear Lake’s uranium by writing an opera.

A year later, I find myself in the Batons’ trailer. Dizzy from the cigarette smoke, I stand up to leave. Theresa grabs my hand and thanks me for coming. “You didn’t bring one of those tape recorders,” she says. “That’s good.” Later, one of the community workers tells me, “Lots of people come to interview the elders here. Not many come to talk.” As I bundle into my new snowsuit, Peter shakes his head and insists on lending me a pair of long beaver mitts. He says the weather is unusually cold at minus forty-eight, and that, if I pay attention, I can hear ice crack.

I wave goodbye and stumble into the frigid air. As I head to my hotel, I pass the cemetery with its rows of tiny white crosses. Sitting offshore in a blanket of brilliance is Isadore Yukon’s old tugboat, the Radium Gilbert—retired sometime in the 1960s and bought by the Dene Band Council for one dollar. Her graffiti-scratched hull tilts drunkenly in the snow. When they took a Geiger counter through the boat years ago, it was her shower that had the highest levels of radioactivity.

I started going to seminars about how to survive a nuclear war when I was sixteen. It was 1971, and the peace movement—the one my generation thought would save the world—was just getting going. Helen Caldicott hadn’t yet terrified us with her documentary If You Love This Planet, but I still didn’t sleep at night. While my parents sat with their Scotches watching Ed Sullivan on our black-and-white television, I went to the field behind our house on the outskirts of Toronto to see if planes flying overhead would drop something big. I lived in perpetual anticipation of sudden explosions. I wanted to be sure that when the world blew up there would be an escape route, a door with an exit sign. One Sunday afternoon in August, I clipped an announcement from the Toronto Telegram, figured out the mysteries of the subway system and found my way to a convention hall downtown. There, I looked at exhibits about how to keep food for long periods of time, and took notes on staying warm underground during a Canadian nuclear winter.

After graduating from university, I took the train west to the coast. I had job leads in Edmonton and Vancouver, so I researched each city’s escape plan. Every municipality, now as well as then, has a strategy in the event of disaster. Edmonton felt safer because there were highways out of town. Vancouver made me nervous—all those mountains hemming you in on one side, the unforgiving ocean on the other. During a beautiful summer spent on Wreck Beach, while my new friends were falling in and out of love, I read survival manuals and discovered that the most organized city in North America was Seattle. There was a clear chain of command, one person who made the decisions and put the action plan into effect: the Fire Chief. I seriously considered moving there.

When William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1949, he spoke about the curse of not having a future. “There are no longer problems of the spirit,” he said. “There is only the question: when will I be blown up?” In Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell write that, since 1945, personal losses—the death of a loved one, dislocation from home—have merged with extreme threat: “Just as, after Hiroshima, every antagonism between nations takes on the potential for destroying the entire world, so does every personal trauma potentially take on that end-of-the-world association.” Every danger we experience, personal or private, puts us psychically on the edge of disaster, worrying about the next emergency: an earthquake in Japan, a friend with cancer, a depressed parent.

For North Americans, the September 11 attacks didn’t inaugurate the visceral, urgent sense of threat to “home” and “security”; they merely ripped off the protective scab that had grown over the wounds of 1945. We still live in fear—of terrorism, of radiation contamination, of the apocalypse. The twentysomething man who owns the corner store near my house says he doesn’t think about nuclear weapons. But he knows the planet will have no edible food in ten years, so he keeps tins and seed packets in the basement. That is what humans do when we’re in danger: we hide, we conceal ourselves, we seek shelter. Like Adam, we are always running for cover. God asks Adam, “Where are you?” Goethe replies, “If I knew myself, I’d run away.”

Great Bear Lake is more than thirty thousand square kilometres of inland sea, close to the upper limit of the tree line. It’s bordered on its south and west sides by black and white spruce, with a sprinkling of muskeg; on its north, the forest gives way to tundra. During the 1930s, a whole village sprung up around the site of the Eldorado mine on the lake’s eastern shore. There was a school, a store and lodging for the white miners. Once, the circus even came to town.

I stay at Grey Goose Lodge, the only hotel in Déline. A dozen rooms, a restaurant, a gift shop and a porch. It’s February. With so little daylight, time is organized differently here, and there is unrelenting activity. Large vehicles idle outside, exhaust clouding the brittle air. If you turn the motors off, they’ll freeze up and you won’t get them going again.

In my hotel room, I run a bath and sit with my feet in hot water, thinking about what I’ve learned in Déline so far. “We did not know the ore was bad,” one person said. “Non-natives didn’t know, either.” The Dene started to ask questions in the 1980s when their men began to die. The Medical Officer of Health for the Northwest Territories only began a register of diagnoses and deaths in 1989–90; the year before, it listed fourteen Dene men who worked in the mining, milling or transport of radium and uranium. All of them died from cancers associated with exposure to radioactive contaminants: lung, bone, throat.

Deborah Simmons, a staff person for the Déline Uranium Team, comes to the hotel and drops off They Never Told Us These Things, a report the Dene researched, wrote and carried to Ottawa in 1998. The 160 pages are carefully detailed and plainspoken. I read that, from the beginning of the mine’s operations, the government had kept crucial information from the Dene. In 1932, the Annual Report of the Department of Mines mandated weekly lung tests for miners, as well as monthly blood tests for lab workers—but only in Canada’s south. The 1933 report included a lengthy and detailed examination of the ore’s dangers: “when the insidious and deadly nature of radium is considered, too much care cannot be taken.” But nobody told the Dene who carried and transported it. Nor, it seems, did anyone tell the white miners who worked underground, and who also lived at Port Radium.

Cindy Kenny Gilday, a Dene activist and a major force behind the trip to Hiroshima, writes about a packed community meeting in Déline, where lawyers delivered a year’s worth of uranium-impact research from the archives in Ottawa. “‘In the mountain of papers we dug up in Ottawa this year on this issue, there is not one mention of the Dene, your people,’” the lawyers say in Gilday’s retelling. “The hall went completely silent. The elders had incredulous looks on their faces, a combination of sadness and anger.”

The DUT has spent years researching the effects of the mine on the community. In 1998, it sent a delegation to Ottawa. A year later, it agreed to a co-operative process with the federal government to research the health and environmental impacts of the mine. The result—called the Canada-Déline Uranium Table Final Report, released in 2005—made twenty-six recommendations. Some have been addressed, and cleanup work in partnership with the Dene is ongoing. But the report also concluded that there was not enough evidence to link working for Eldorado to cancers in the area. Although significant contamination was found in the lake and on the mine site, none, according to the report, would harm the fish or wildlife the people depend on.

The CDUT report has faced criticism both inside and outside Déline. Well-known environmental journalist Andrew Nikiforuk expressed concern that the study’s narrow framing weakened its findings. Intertek, the official fact-finder hired for the CDUT report, was not able to access key archival information. The only statistics considered relevant in the determination of cancer-related deaths were body counts. But in David Henningson’s 2006 documentary, Somba Ke: The Money Place, cancer research scientist Rosalie Bertell argues that using death records to assess the effects of uranium on a population is insufficient. “Bertell maintains that the only way to do this kind of investigation (she apparently offered this to the community) is to do blood and urine analyses,” Peter van Wyck writes in his book Highway of the Atom, “which would at least allow for correlation with exposure.”

Eldorado was reopened as a silver mine in 1963, then closed again in 1982. Today, almost ten years after my visit to Déline, Alberta Star Development Corporation has extensively staked and test-drilled the area. The company’s website describes large uranium anomalies that have never been explored, and Alberta Star is trying to determine “if there is a potential resource to support the recommencement of commercial production at the mine sites.” Alberta Star’s permit, granted with permission from the Déline Land Corporation, officially expires in 2013, but if it continues to meet regulatory requirements, its mineral claim will remain in effect indefinitely. Uranium mining doesn’t just provoke controversy—it also provides jobs.

Known for their pioneering self-governance, the Sahtúgot’ine have undertaken a series of initiatives in land stewardship, including cleanup work at the various abandoned mine sites on the lake, as recommended by the CDUT report. Still, many questions remain. They Never Told Us These Things asks how Ottawa could have knowingly let the Bear Lake people select contaminated areas for settlement during their land-claims process in the early nineties. The Sahtúgot’ine say their families have lost faith in governments and their young people see no future; they believe that their place in the world is poisoned and their children will die.

The Dene report also mentions the Japanese: “We are suffering intense guilt and grief in our community that the materials we carried to the barges and to the aircraft went to make an atomic bomb that killed many tens of thousands of human beings in Japan. Our people feel that if they had been told what they were helping to do, they would not have done it.”

Shortly before I leave Déline there is a feast. I sit beside long sheets of brown paper rolled out on the community hall floor, and eat caribou and potatoes. The meat is too gamey for me; it makes me gag and I’m ashamed. I look around at the people I have met and wonder how I’ll do justice to any of this with the opera I plan to write. (It would eventually become Shelter, composed by Juliet Palmer and produced by Tapestry New Opera in Toronto.) I have tried to get a sense of this place but have deliberately not asked questions that might stir up painful memories. After dinner, two more people invite me to visit their homes the next day—my last in Déline—and have tea. Suddenly, a week seems painfully inadequate.

Following the meal, we move to rows of chairs and have a discussion about Eldorado, and what it means to unearth this history. A woman stands up, leans for a moment on her husband’s shoulder, straightens and says, “Let’s get on. It’s about the future. Enough with the past.” Another man beside her seems angry. He gets up, speaks to the group: “If you’ve got something to say, pull it out of your pocket. Otherwise, it will rot.”

When I fly out of Déline, I have a stopover in Norman Wells, the Northwest Territories. In the town’s small museum, there’s a display of photos and artifacts from the Eldorado mine, and I find a photograph of a bottle fastened to a plywood frame. I lean over the railing to look more closely. The bottle is attached to a commemorative plaque placed outside the miners’ changing room at Port Radium. Inside the bottle is trinitite, the olive-coloured, glass-like substance made when the sand hit by the first atomic explosion melted and solidified. The trinitite traveled all the way from the New Mexico desert to the mine at Port Radium. I decide to make the same trip in reverse.

At the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, there are sterling silver earrings for sale in the shapes of Little Boy and Fat Man, the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When they were first sold in the museum’s boutique, Japanese tourists complained and the earrings were removed. But when I visit in 2004 they are back, displayed on the shelf with other assorted souvenirs. I buy a pair, thinking nobody will believe me otherwise, then drive down an open highway to southern New Mexico, arriving after sunset at a cheap motel. I lie awake thinking about the next day, about putting on a miner’s cap and taking an elevator a mile underground. I think about cancer and gamma rays and wish I were writing an opera about eating and drinking across Italy.

I hit the road again as the sun comes up and suddenly, in the middle of scrub desert, there is the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, advertised as “the world’s first underground repository licensed to safely and permanently dispose of transuranic radioactive waste.” This includes all kinds of things, like lab coats and instruments, that have been exposed to enough uranium to have a half-life longer than twenty years—they will be radioactive for a very long time. The WIPP is surrounded by kilometres of fence and wire. I check in at the gate, park the car and meet an engineer, a public relations guy and a young indigenous man with a briefcase and a crooked smile. They sit me down in a boardroom and give me a two-hour briefing: what to know before going down the elevator shaft.

Things don’t go wrong at the WIPP. If they do, there are controls. For example, when you get “occupational exposure,” you’ll hear one of three levels of alarms (“Bell, Yelp or Gong”), at which point you move to the colour-coded staging area. You have to be over eighteen to visit. You sink more than six hundred metres, travelling fast in a tiny elevator, passing through forty-two square kilometres of fossilized coral reef; millions of years ago, this area was covered by ocean. Each drum of waste is wrapped in layers of lead and dropped slowly into one hundred million cubic metres of salt, one of nature’s most stable compounds.

Radioactive waste comes here by truck from seven sites across the United States—a huge, choreographed dance number. To get a truck into the WIPP, you need to jump through a series of bureaucratic hoops; the engineer says, “We’re held hostage by politics.” I think of the elderly World War II veterans I watched the day before, guiding bored high-school students through the Atomic Museum. They delivered a sanitized account of why the bomb was dropped, with no mention of the politics around Truman’s decision: the opening gambits of the Cold War; the pressure to show America’s new weapon to the Russians and to create a test case the government could study.

The elevator plummets through the earth. We step out into a long tunnel bustling with workers, their hard hats eager spotlights in the dull blackness. I tentatively put my hand against cold wet walls of salt, and the engineer continues his story with enthusiasm. There are three or four trucks on the road at a time, travelling with their precious cargo. Two guys are on board each truck, and they stop every 150 miles for a complete two-hour inspection. The drivers need thirty-five thousand miles of driving experience, can have no violations, are all in their forties or fifties—they know what they’re doing. There have only been two “road events,” one involving a nineteen-year-old and a six-pack of Corona. The kid’s Toyota hit the back of the truck and flipped it at some rural intersection in a not-to-be-mentioned state. Apparently there was no damage, and they tell me the beer was okay.

I also have an invitation to visit the Trinity site in the White Sands Missile Range, where the first atomic bomb was exploded on July 16, 1945. I stop for a coffee, delaying, afraid of this part of my journey. It seems crazy to have spent my youth trying to escape a nuclear blast and to now, voluntarily, drive to Ground Zero. But it also feels like something is coming full circle in my life, even if I don’t know what it is.

I head west across sixty-four kilometres of the Tularosa Basin. White Sands, located in south-central New Mexico, helps the US military with “experimentation, test, research, assessment, development and training in support of the Nation at war.” On my way to the Trinity site, I step out onto the tarmac of a tiny missile museum. Holding my hair back with both hands as the February wind slams into me, I stare at what must be thirty military rockets, tall white cones crowded onto an acre of land, a flock of odd birds stranded in this empty way station.

White Sands is an endless expanse of desert and cactus, and most of what goes on here is secret. There is a great deal of terrorism research, and somewhere out of sight is a scale model of the building targeted in the Oklahoma City bombing. I’m taken through a guarded gate and driven into the desert until we reach a small circular area surrounded by a high wire fence. I walk inside. In the centre is a three-and-a-half-metre stone monument marking the spot where the bomb exploded. Every metre or so along the fence, tied crudely to the wire, are black-and-white photographs: the blast, the farmhouse where the scientists stayed, an atomic equation. As we enter, someone tells me not to worry; one hour of radiation here is about the same as skiing on a mountain in sunlight. I look at my watch.

My father is almost ninety. His most vivid memory of the atomic bomb, he tells me, is of my mother coming into their kitchen with a magazine in her hands. “I was cooking, a pot was simmering, I was stirring. She stood in the doorway, shaking, in a yellow sundress. Life magazine photos, I think. Thin-skinned, your mother.” He smiles and reaches a bony, spotted arm to pat me on the knee. “She was missing the tough layer, the one that keeps you safe. A strong woman on the outside. Inside, fragile. Things could break.”

August 6, 1945 was a Monday. The Enola Gay left Tinian Island’s North Field at 2:45 am. There were little explosions along the runway from the flashes of photographers, who were alerted that something big was breaking. Special Bombing Mission Number 13 took off without a hitch, with Little Boy in its bomb bay. The target was the T-shaped Aoio Bridge, in the centre of Hiroshima.

The Enola Gay dropped its bundle at 8:15 am. At 2:58 pm, the plane landed back on Tinian. The pilot was decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross, while the other members of his crew received Air Medals. On August 9, 1945, the Enola Gay flew reconnaissance to Kokura as a support plane for Special Bombing Mission Number 16, which dropped Fat Man on the city of Nagasaki.

Physicist John Manley suggested the blast of the Trinity atomic bomb—the first ever—looked like a black rose, its petals unfurling as it grew skyward. In October of 1945, a crowd gathered in the Los Angeles Coliseum to witness a recreation of the bombing of Japan. A mushroom cloud burst from the field to the enraptured cheers of the crowd.

Many of the atomic-bomb scientists were deeply conflicted about their discovery. After a party celebrating the first test, J. Robert Oppenheimer saw a colleague throwing up and thought, “It’s started.” Three months later, the “father of the bomb” retired as director of Los Alamos, and each worker was given a silver pin stamped with a large “A” and a small “bomb.” “I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer,” US Vice-President Henry Wallace wrote in his diary. “The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.”

Fifty-three years after Fat Man and Little Boy, the delegation of Sahtúgot’ine travelled from Déline to Japan, to apologize to atomic bomb survivors and their relatives. The filmmaker Peter Blow was with them, shooting his documentary Village of Widows. When I watch the film for the first time in my living room in Toronto, it is an old Dene man’s testimony about the ore that stops me. “I thought it was gold,” he says. “I thought they made rings, or something, in the south.”

On my last night in Déline, I go ice fishing. A man named Gordon Taniton, his round face framing a flashing smile, has been teasing me that I don’t have “northern patience.” He picks me up from the steps of the small community centre. I climb onto his red snowmobile and we follow the shoreline of Great Bear, past tiny houses puffing smoke as the sun bleeds fire along an indigo horizon. We lurch onto the lake and head full steam toward a small white canvas tent about a kilometre out. As we pull up, Gordon switches off the engine and the silence roars back like a giant wave hitting an empty beach.

He takes me inside and proudly shows me a battered couch, an acrylic rose rug and an airtight stove. He loads it up with wood, tosses in a match and points at a dark circle cut out of the floor. “The fish down there aren’t just food. They give us Sahtú people our freedom. Maybe one will find you.” He hands me a cold black rod. “Don’t let the fire go out—you’ll freeze! Sit yourself on that couch, prop your feet to hold you steady and drop your line down. Then wait.”

I listen as the snowmobile disappears into the night. After a half-hour or so, my northern patience wears out and I pull out my copy of They Never Told Us These Things. The bundle of papers falls open to a photocopied page I hadn’t noticed before.

It’s a map, drawn in pencil, of the mine on Great Bear Lake. The names of its authors are written in the upper right-hand corner: Huey Ferdinand, Irene Betsidea, Mary Kodakin, Paul Baton. Along the top, a jagged line indicates a row of cliffs, the pencil tracing how the land curves into inlets. There are small squares indicating locations of interest: the tugboat that carried the ore, places contaminated by oil, a winter airstrip, a tennis court (beside chemical bags), houses for miners (beside sewage dumped in the water), a bank, store, skating rink, school. In a small circle is written, “deep pond on top of hill.” Outside the circle: “child drowns, pond drained.”

The map—situated as it is inside a report sent to Ottawa, a book on a shelf, an archive—shows what French theorist Pierre Nora calls “les lieux de mémoire.” These are sites where an intersection of history, memory and engagement “blocks the work of forgetting” and “carries a will to remember”; they are transitive moments in the culture of a living people.

Running diagonally across the map are two long, narrow strips, with a row of tiny arrows inside each. These are the underground tunnels that lead from the mine, more than 240 metres below the surface, to “way far” under the lake. Water has continuously penetrated the three-metre-wide tunnels. The Dene are concerned that, decades after the mine was abandoned, water that has absorbed radioactive minerals has filled the tunnels and is now seeping back into the lake.

Great Bear is a beautiful spot to sit and fish. I think of the 740,000 tons of radioactive tailings left in the lake beneath me. Thorium-230, a hazardous nuclide found in uranium tailings, has a half-life of about eighty thousand years.”

https://maisonneuve.org/article/2011/08/12/they-never-told-us-these-things/

Other operators, however, are already seeing the spread of the infection slow things down. In Great Britain, authorities announced they are shutting down a nuclear fuel reprocessing site at Sellafield after 8 percent of its 11,500-strong staff were forced to self-isolate to avoid infection. The move came after an employee tested positive for the coronavirus last week, and will lead to a gradual shutdown of the site’s Magnox facility, which is slated to close permanently later this year.

Sellafield told employees that it would work to “make best use of available people”.

France, the world’s most nuclear dependent nation, announced staff reductions at its Flameville plant in the country’s north. The EDF, France’s national nuclear operator, said that, due to high regional infection rates, it was reducing the staff at the plant from 800 to 100. As early as March 10, EDF reported that three workers at nuclear power plants had tested positive for the virus.

A spokesman for the Flameville plant told Reuters that “we have decided to only keep those in charge of safety and security” working while the coronavirus crisis runs its course.

French grid operator RTE expects nuclear availability to stay 3.6GW below the 2015 to 2019 average and likewise predicts a national drop in nuclear demand.

Taken together, the emergency responses of national nuclear operators are symptoms of a big problem that Covid-19 posed to the nuclear sector, Mycle Schneider and independent energy and nuclear policy analyst told Power Technology Magazine.

“Covid-19 constitutes an unprecedented threat on sensitive strategic infrastructure, above all the power sector,” he said.

“The French case sheds light on a fundamental societal safety and security issue that got little attention in the current Covid-19 crisis. Operation and maintenance of nuclear power plants draw on a small group of highly specialized technicians and engineers.”

Because of that very level of specialization, some in the US nuclear industry are considering simply isolating nuclear plant technicians onsite in a sort of preventative quarantine.

Maria Korsnick, head of the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute told the New York Times that plants are “considering measures to isolate a core group to run the plant, stockpiling ready-to-eat meals and disposable tableware, laundry supplies and personal care items.”

The US Department of Homeland Security is responsible for working with nuclear power plant operators to maintain their operations during a national emergency. On Thursday, the department issued guidelines that echoed the ones suggested by Korsnick.

“When continuous remote work is not possible, businesses should enlist strategies to reduce the likelihood of spreading the disease,” the DHS said in a memo, according to Power Magazine. “This includes, but is not necessarily limited to, separating staff by off-setting shift hours or days and/or social distancing.”

Roy Palk, president and CEO of New Horizons Consulting, which advises energy companies in the US, told the magazine that, “There are a lot of unanswered questions because this is not a model everyone is used to working with.”

To keep the lights on, he said, utilities and power plant operators might have to consider keeping staff onsite for the long term.

“These operators have a license to operate, they’re highly skilled, highly trained. They have to be certified.” he told the magazine. “These individuals need to be on the job, they need to be healthy. They have a big obligation to the public.”

Reuters contacted a dozen other power providers, all of whom said they were implementing plans to moderate risks to their employees and to ensure continuity of service, but who declined to comment on whether sequestering staff was a possibility.

In New York, Consolidated Edison Inc, which provides power to around 3.3 million customers and gas to about 1.1 million customers in New York City and Westchester County – both of which are under virus lockdowns – said it was taking steps to keep critical employees healthy, including separating some control center personnel to other locations where they can perform their work.

Duke Energy Corp, which provides power to 7.7 million customers in six states and gas to 1.6 million customers in five states, said it instituted additional worker screening measures, such as temperature checks, at generating and other critical facilities.

Puget Sound Energy, which serves more than 1.5 million customers in the Seattle, Washington area – a region hard hit by coronavirus – said all non-essential workers are working remotely, and the utility has limited access to facilities that provide critical operations.”
Link: https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2020-03-covid-19-could-cause-staff-shortages-in-the-nuclear-power-industry

“I was coated like flour in radium dust as it leaked from the heavy bags on my back. It gets into your clothes, hair, mouth and hands. During the long barge trips across the lake and down the Bear and Mackenzie we would sleep and sit on the sacks.”

In Ottawa, mining officials were warned that exposure to radium dust was harmful. (Radium is a radioactive metal found in uranium.) The information was kept secret.

Local children also played with the ore and waste from the mine was dumped into Great Bear Lake. Dene women used the discarded sacks as shelters.

“Our canvas tents were all worn out and could not keep the rain out very well. Because the men worked as labourers for the mine, they kept ripped ore bags and brought these back for us to use. I made three tents from these bags. ”

After the war, the Dene town on the shores of Great Bear Lake would become known as the village of widows, because so many of the men die of cancer.

At Los Alamos, New Mexico, the uranium was used to develop the first atomic bomb in a feverish race that brought together dozens of scientists. Howe offered Albertas wide-open spaces as a test site for the new weapon but the Americans preferred the New Mexico desert.

The atomic bomb was successfully tested on July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Then on August 6, the American bomber Enola Gay, flew over Japan and dropped the atomic bomb code-named Fat Man on Hiroshima, a city of 343,000. Sixty per cent of the city was razed by the blast, and 100,000 people died immediately, with tens of thousands dying of radiation poisoning within several months.”
Link: https://www.cbc.ca/history/EPISCONTENTSE1EP14CH2PA3LE.html

Around 20 million shipments of nuclear and other radioactive material are regularly transported within countries and across borders each year. These materials are used in industry, agriculture and medicine, as well as in education. Some of them are also radioactive sources that are no longer useful, known as disused sources.

The aim of nuclear security during transport is to ensure that the material is secured throughout and that it is not used for criminal or malicious purposes. While the level of security differs depending on the sensitivity of the material, the fundamental elements of secure transport include physical protection, administrative measures, training and protection of information about the transport routes and schedule. In some cases, escort personnel may also need to be armed.

Some of the major challenges with transport include the fluidity of the situation and the need to continually assess any potential threats and adjust the plans accordingly.

“At a stationary facility, it is easier to protect a radioactive source, or a disused source, through the facility’s security systems and measures as well as its layers of defense. When it is in transport, there are many more variables, people involved and context changes with every mile travelled. Even an incident as small as a minor traffic collision could freeze the flow of traffic and paralyze the movement of people and goods,” Ladsous said.

To prepare for all possible scenarios, the professionals involved, such as operators, regulators, police, military, and health and environmental agencies, have to use agreed operational procedures and communication methods. These coordinated efforts are guided by legislation and regulations that designate appropriate responsibilities to the relevant authorities, outline communication procedures and ensure sufficient financial support. When this coordination occurs internationally, it involves all relevant customs and transit authorities, which is often facilitated with support from the IAEA.

“During conversion of our research reactor from high enriched to low enriched uranium fuel, we had to transport highly radioactive spent reactor fuel from the site to the airport to be sent back to the original manufacturer, and we had to transport the new low enriched uranium fuel from the airport to the facility,” said Yusuf A. Ahmed, Director of the Centre for Energy Research and Training in Nigeria, who was involved in the conversion project. “Although the transport time is only a few hours, there is a lot that can happen during that time, from simple traffic accidents to malicious interventions and sabotage of shipments.”

Upon request, the IAEA also helps countries to draft regulations associated with transport security. In 2019, the IAEA supported more than 15 countries in drafting transport security requirements.

“As a country embarking on nuclear power, we will be transporting a significant amount of nuclear material and radioactive sources on our roads,” said Sami Sulaiman, Chairman of the Egyptian Nuclear and Radiological Regulatory Authority. “In early 2020, we will have a decree, drafted with IAEA assistance, that will strictly regulate any movement of such material.”

While only around 30 countries use nuclear power and therefore have significant amounts of nuclear materials to transport, almost all countries use radioactive sources. The IAEA assists countries with the security of disused sources. Such sources are beyond their useful life but can remain radioactive for a long time and frequently require transport to temporary storage facilities or permanent repositories.

“Whether it’s a disused source or radioactive material that’s ready for use, these materials need well-coordinated nuclear security systems and measures to minimize the vulnerabilities of transport and strengthen nuclear security overall,” Ladsous said.”
Link: https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/a-moving-target-nuclear-security-during-transport

Trump’s tweet acknowledges the fierce and long-standing opposition to Yucca Mountain in a swing state he lost by a slim margin in 2016. The Democratic presidential candidates are unanimously opposed to storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

A permanent impasse. Yucca Mountain has spent much of its existence as a political football. The original Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 required detailed characterization of three potential repository sites for the disposal of the nation’s spent commercial nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste from the nuclear weapons complex. By 1986 it was clear that work on three sites would be very costly, and Congress balked at the price tag. Political wrangling ensued, and it was no accident that among the three states under consideration—Nevada, Texas, and Washington—the one with the most-junior congressional delegation, including a newly elected Senator Harry Reid, was selected as the only site to be characterized by the Energy Department for suitability as a repository.

Thereafter, appropriation of funds for work on Yucca Mountain was continuously subject to political whims in Congress. Senator Reid, for instance, repeatedly blocked funding for Yucca Mountain after the House had approved it. And it’s an old adage among US nuclear waste experts that nothing ever happens with nuclear waste during an election year.

At the moment, no one involved in the process has an incentive to make progress. An extremely partisan House and Senate are at a permanent impasse on an issue that bears little on re-election chances (except in Nevada). The nuclear industry has found they can build new reactors—the two Westinghouse AP1000 units under construction in Georgia—without a solution to their spent fuel problem. The Energy Department, originally tasked with solving the problem, has no legal authority (or appropriations) to move forward. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which passed a Continued Storage Rule in 2014, vacated its ability to force a solution. And many anti-nuclear interest groups that oppose waste transport and repositories have called for “hardened on-site storage.”

Pressure to do something is building, though, as more reactors shut down around the country. Since 2013, nine reactors have permanently closed, and by 2025 at least six more are slated to join them. These 15 will join the 12 reactors already shut down, for a total of 27 around the country. Eleven of them have been or are being completely decommissioned, so all that will remain on site will be the spent fuel, awaiting a solution. Leaving spent fuel in dry storage in perpetuity is not a solution: The casks won’t last forever and will need to be changed out periodically (experts do not yet know how long they will last). Can the American public ensure that a benevolent government will exist 50, 100, or 1,000 years from now to carry out this task? We cannot.

“Solutions” that aren’t. Both President Trump and Undersecretary Menezes referenced “innovative approaches” to dealing with spent nuclear fuel. Are there actual alternatives to a repository at Yucca Mountain? There might be alternatives to the Yucca Mountain site, but there is no escaping the need for a deep geologic repository to dispose of spent nuclear fuel. Numerous studies have come to this conclusion, including the US National Research Council, the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future established by the Obama administration to consider alternative strategies of nuclear waste disposal (I served on the commission), and a recent report out of Stanford and George Washington Universities (I was on the steering committee for the report).

Ideas such as “advanced” reactors that use waste as fuel, deep borehole disposal, and the perpetually-proposed reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel have all been presented as solutions to our current dilemma. None are. Studies that my colleagues and I have done, and the National Research Council consensus report, show that all reactors and reprocessing schemes produce wastes that are highly active and long-lived and therefore still require disposal.

The Trump administration appears interested in reviving reprocessing as a “solution” for spent nuclear fuel. It’s not a solution, simply a costly management strategy. The few countries that still reprocess spent fuel, such as France, plan to use a geologic repository for the high-level waste produced. France, in fact, has already selected a site for its repository. Even if somehow, as some claim, reprocessing reduced wastes to those dominated by 30-year half-lives, a repository would still be required as, again, institutions cannot be guaranteed to last 300 years, the amount of time needed for the waste to fully decay. With impending climate-change effects such as significant sea level rise by 2100, who knows what the world will look like in 300 years, both physically and politically?

Deep boreholes, though perhaps appropriate for some radioactive wastes, would be hard-pressed to handle spent fuel due in part to the narrow borehole diameter, limited to thin-walled canisters that can only hold one spent fuel assembly each. The thin walls and significantly more numerous canisters would increase worker doses and reduce the canisters’ strength to resist the overlying rock burden. The depth of the boreholes—up to 5 kilometers—and the limited ability to access them without disturbing the natural environment would result in a limited capability to adequately characterize the geologic environment at depth. Even more challenging would be to ensure that radioactivity cannot escape up the backfilled borehole.

Political innovations needed. All countries with commercial nuclear energy programs agree that geologic repositories are the only solution to the problem of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The problems facing repositories are not primarily technical (though these exist), but political. Political innovations are truly needed to successfully site these facilities.

Such innovations already exist: Finland is currently constructing its deep geologic repository, and Sweden isn’t far behind. Switzerland, France, and Canada have all made significant progress in the last few years. The United States, in fact, is the only country with an operating deep geologic repository—the Waste Isolation Pilot Project that houses transuranic waste from the nuclear weapons complex in southeastern New Mexico—proving that it can be done here.

There are important lessons to learn from the mistakes and successes of these other programs: The host community must accept the site by a large majority; the host community must be compensated; it must be allowed to veto the site, up to a predefined point in the process; the process works best when the host community is allowed to participate in site development and conduct its own independent research; the nuclear waste management organization and the nuclear regulator must be trusted institutions; and the waste management organization must have the ability to manage its own budget and plan for the long term.

None of this is rocket science, and these lessons have been spelled out numerous times in the United States. The real question is whether anyone with political power is listening.”

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 21 February 2020

The Toronto plant has never had an accident. And the nuclear safety commission said testing shows radiation levels in soil and air around the plant are not only far below allowable levels, but even lower than the radiation in our everyday lives, which comes from a variety of sources including the sun as well as the breakdown of radioactive minerals found naturally in rock and soil.

However, the application to renew the licence, which includes public hearings, is one of the first opportunities many residents will have to ask questions after finding out in 2012 from a Star story that the plant — owned by GE-Hitachi until December of 2016 — was making pellets.
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The story was the result of activist Zach Ruiter, a freelance journalist and Trent University graduate, who knocked on doors to alert residents that the plant existed. Ruiter said he felt there was a lack of public awareness and not enough public consultation by the CNSC.
At that time, signs on buildings at the Toronto plant simply said the company’s name — there was no indication that it was a nuclear facility.

The CNSC required GE-Hitachi to have an outreach program, but most community members didn’t know what the plant manufactured despite its presence in the neighbourhood since 1965.

Now, nearly 250 individuals and organizations have registered to intervene either as speakers or in writing during hearings in March, when the commission will hold two-day public sessions in Toronto as well as Peterborough, where BWXT owns another former GE-Hitachi plant. The Peterborough plant consolidates the pellets into fuel bundles for Ontario Power Generation’s Pickering and Darlington nuclear generating stations.
The licence renewal, which CNSC staff have recommended be approved, is for both plants.

“From the CNSC staff perspective, there are no risks,” said Caroline Ducros, director of the safety commission’s nuclear processing facilities division. “The quantities (of uranium) that are leaving the (Toronto) plant are negligible.”

Despite the assurance, Muir said he didn’t feel confident after leaving the CNSC’s public information meeting.
There were a number of unanswered questions, he said, including what happens if the tank full of highly flammable liquid hydrogen — the pellets are baked in a furnace filled with hydrogen — catches fire? What’s the blast radius? Or the company’s emergency plan?

The company says it has an internal emergency response plan for both sites, with guidelines for emergency staff and plant personnel, which is sent to the CNSC.

And that “each BWXT facility has established emergency prevention programs to minimize the risk of fires and other hazardous events, as well as robust response plans that prescribe the actions to be taken to prevent or minimize potential health and environmental hazards,” wrote Natalie Cutler, BWXT’s director of communications and government relations, in an email.

Muir also wondered why, with such an increase in public interest, so few residents knew about the CNSC information meeting, where commission staff and experts, together with BWXT employees, anti-nuclear activists and politicians seemed to outnumber the 15 or so people from the community.

Kevin Lee, a senior regulatory policy officer at the CNSC, which employs 900 staff, said the commission couldn’t afford to notify the public by advertising in newspapers because it was too expensive. The organization relies on social media.

BWXT’s application is not only generating opposition in Toronto, but in Peterborough because of a provision in the new licence that would allow BWXT to move its Toronto pelleting operation anytime during its 10-year period to Peterborough.

Activists there say they are tired of dealing with the legacy waste from the GE-Hitachi plant, which used PCBs, asbestos as well as other chemicals at the Peterborough location, although in manufacturing operations that were unrelated to the nuclear fuel bundling division bought by BWXT.

At its height in the ’60s, the GE plant in Peterborough employed 6,000 people. But the numbers steadily decreased and in 2017 the company laid off 350 employees in its large motor division, where it made motors for cruise ship propellers or to pump oil, among other things. About 50 employees remained in engineering and sales.

“It’s just worrying because there’s alway accidents and fugitive emissions whenever there’s a factory,” said Jane Scott, who became aware of GE’s nuclear division in Peterborough about 10 years ago when her children were students at nearby Prince of Wales elementary school.

“I thought what the heck is a nuclear facility doing across from the school,” Scott said.

Scott co-founded Peterborough’s Citizens Against Radioactive Neighbourhoods (CARN) in April of last year after hearing that BWXT might move the pelleting operation to Peterborough.

“Extreme events happen and people make mistakes, as BWXT has in the past. And GE before that,” Scott said. “So it’s just a no-brainer that this should not be in the heart of our downtown.”

Scott was referring to an incident at BWXT in Peterborough where two workers wore the wrong respirator filters 15 times over a two-year period, from 2015 to 2017, exposing them to airborne beryllium, a highly toxic metal used to join parts of fuel bundles together.

“These employees were assessed and have been returned to normal duties,” said Cutler in an email. “There was no off-site exposure or release of beryllium, and there was no health or safety risk posed to the public or environment.”

In Toronto, Julie Dzerowicz, MP for the Davenport riding, said she has consulted a number of people about the BWXT pelleting plant on Lansdowne and has not heard any information that makes her think it’s a danger.

Canadians typically receive a 1.8 millisievert dose a year of background radiation, which is found naturally in the air, soil, rocks, water, plants and food, according to the CNSC. We are exposed to higher doses when we have x-rays or diagnostic imaging.
The CNSC said the annual public dose from the Toronto plant in 2018 was 0.0004 millisieverts and that epidemiological studies show there are no adverse health effects for any dose below 100 millisieverts.
Dzerowicz said if anyone presents her with evidence that shows she should be concerned for the health and safety of Davenport residents, she “will take urgent and immediate action.”

However, Dzerowicz was adamant residents in her riding be allowed to ask their own questions and requested the CNSC hold hearings in her riding, as opposed to the original location — a hotel near the Yorkdale Shopping Centre where the commission planned to simulcast proceedings from a physical location in Peterborough.

The CNSC complied and the Toronto hearings on March 2 and 3 will be held at Casa do Alentejo at 1130 Dupont St., where Dzerowicz plans to speak as an intervener.

“I’d like to represent what I’ve been hearing from Davenport residents,” she said.

Those concerns include more transparency regarding test results of air and soil samples, more safety audits of the plant by the CNSC and information about the company’s emergency plan.

BWXT does in-stack air monitoring every day and according to the company’s website, the sample results are verified by an independent laboratory. At the perimeter of the plant, five monitoring stations draw air into a filter and the amount of uranium dioxide captured by the filter is analyzed by a third-party lab.

Soil sampling is done less often — once a year by BWXT and about once every two years by the CNSC — because there has been little change in the concentration of uranium over time, said BWXT president John MacQuarrie.

Wastewater used in the plant to clean floors, equipment and protective clothing is held in storage tanks and treated to remove as much uranium dioxide as possible before it is released into the city’s sewage system.

“We all get radiation in our daily lives. And what our plant contributes to that is insignificant,” MacQuarrie said. “And we operate well below what the regulators consider as safe … And so we’re quite confident, after many years of the business being operated, that it’s a highly safe operation.”

According to company reports, from 2014 to 2018 BWXT emitted 46.2 grams of uranium dioxide into the air and 3.6 kilograms into the city’s wastewater, levels that are far below the allowable air emissions of 760 grams and water emissions of 9,000 kilograms per year. (The charitable organization Lake Ontario Waterkeeper has entered a submission recommending, among things, that what it calls “absurdly high” annual release limits be reduced.)

Among the experts Dzerowicz consulted was Gordon Edwards, president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, who is contributing to a submission by the Canadian Environmental Law Association, which is intervening at the hearings on behalf of CARN.

Edwards is a former professor of math and science at Montreal’s Vanier College and has done consulting in the past on nuclear issues for government and industry.

He said studies about the effects of exposure to uranium dioxide have been largely inconclusive, mainly because there are few populations that have been exposed to breathing in the powder.

But he said the BWXT plant in Toronto is giving off “a small but significant” amount of radioactive heavy metal powder into the air that if inhaled could go deep into lung tissue and radiate a cell so that over time it could develop into cancer. He said it could take 20 years for any negative effects to appear because uranium releases its radioactive particles very slowly.

“In the case of Peterborough, there is an elementary school right across the street. And the outdoor playground faces onto the BWXT company just across the street,” possibly exposing kids to the powder for years if the pelleting operation is moved there, he said.

“I’m not saying they’re all going to get cancer. They’re not,” Edwards said. “But some of them could very well get cancer. So it’s a life-threatening situation for those few individuals who might suffer the consequences.”
BWXT says emissions from the Toronto facility are about one per cent of the regulatory limit and do not cause any health impacts to the public or the environment.

A group of scientists who live near the Peterborough fuel-bundling plant are also worried about beryllium.
In a letter to the Examiner newspaper, they expressed concern that recent testing by the CNSC showed concentrations of beryllium in local soil samples had increased since 2014.

“The clear increase of Be in soil samples is likely being driven by significant increases in air concentrations, which is particularly worrying because beryllium can be toxic if inhaled,” reads the letter. “More worryingly, the highest values of beryllium in 2019 were found in the samples in the Prince of Wales school.

“Although none of these samples have reached the threshold at which intervention is mandated, the increase alone mandates intervention and further evaluation to ascertain the source.”

Answers to whether that will happen, as well as other questions, may have to wait until commission hearings in March.

A spokesperson for the CNSC said in an email that questions about where the escaping uranium dioxide goes, what the health effects are or details about the emergency plan will have to wait until then.

“Since the Commission is a quasi-judicial administrative tribunal and currently seized with the matter of BWXT licence renewal, the Commission and CNSC staff cannot further address your followup questions,” according to the email, “as these are about substantive issues that are expected to be dealt with in the context of the upcoming hearing.”

Meanwhile, BWXT says it has no immediate plans to consolidate pellet making and fuel bundling in Peterborough.

But Dzerowicz thinks the company will move the operation from her Toronto riding in the next five years.
“What I would say to you is that over time, and my preference is sooner than later, I would love to see the uranium pelleting out of the riding and out of the city to a different location,” said Dzerowicz, explaining that given land values, it’s only natural the plant would move out to allow more housing.

“I’m not suggesting they move to Peterborough,” Dzerowicz said. “I think it needs to be in a safe area.”

It is alarming to hear the nearby residents in the article say nuclear is clean power – given the fact that no country on Earth has a feasible plan for the long-term storage of dangerous nuclear and radioactive waste products. Most of these products sit in storage facilities near to the reactors themselves.
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Title: Our Aging Nuclear Power Plants
Author: Ari Natter
Date: 9 February 2020
Publication: Go Erie
Link: https://www.goerie.com/business/20200209/our-aging-nuclear-plants

Text:

Utilities nationwide are preparing to follow suit, seeking permission to extend the life of reactors built in the 1970s to the 2050s.

Bonnie Rippingille looked out at the wisps of steam curling from the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant across Biscayne Bay with a sense of dread. In December federal regulators approved Florida Power & Light Co.’s request to let the facility’s twin nuclear reactions remain in operation for another 20 years beyond the end of their current licenses. By that point they’ll be 80, making them the oldest reactors in operation anywhere in the world.

“That’s too old,” said Rippingille, a lawyer and retired Miami-Dade County judge. “They weren’t designed for this purpose.”

With backing from the Trump administration, utilities nationwide are preparing to follow suit, seeking permission to extend the life of reactors built in the 1970s to the 2050s as they run up against the end of their 60-year licenses.

“We are talking about running machines that were designed in the 1960s, constructed in the 1970s and have been operating under the most extreme radioactive and thermal conditions imaginable,” said Damon Moglen, an official with the environmental group Friends of the Earth. “There is no other country in the world that is thinking about operating reactors in the 60 to 80-year time frame.”

Indeed, the move comes as other nations shift away from atomic power over safety concerns, despite its appeal as a carbon-free alternative to coal and other fossil fuels. Japan, which used to get more than a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power, shut down all its plants in 2011 after a tsunami caused a nuclear meltdown at three reactors in Fukushima. Only a handful have restarted while others that can’t meet stringent new standards are slated to close permanently. Germany decided that year to shutter its entire fleet by 2022 and is now having trouble meeting its ambitious climate goals.

By contrast, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is poised to decide this year on requests by subsidiaries of Exelon Corp. to extend the life of two nuclear reactors at its Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania and Dominion Energy Inc. to extend the life of two nuclear reactors at a power plant in Surry, Virginia.

Dominion has notified the commission it intends to ask permission to extend the life of two more reactors north of Richmond, Virginia. Duke Energy Corp. has said it plans to seek license extensions for its entire fleet of 11 nuclear reactors, starting with three in Seneca, South Carolina.

“There are economic benefits,” said Rounette Nader, Duke’s director of nuclear license renewal. “Continuing to operate our existing nuclear fleet is cheaper than replacing it.”

The nuclear industry has been buffeted by a wave of early reactor retirements in the face of competition from cheap natural gas and subsidized renewable power. Constructing a new nuclear plant – the only one being built in the U.S. is years behind schedule and over budget – can cost billions of dollars. Retrofitting an existing one is more likely to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars range.

“It just makes sense,” said Maria Korsnick, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based trade group that represents nuclear utilities. “I don’t think you should look at a plant just on calendar years, but rather the way that plant has been maintained, so many components have been replaced over the years. There is nothing magic about 80.”

Opponents such as Edward Lyman, a nuclear energy expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, argue that older plants contain “structures that can’t be replaced or repaired,” including the garage-sized steel reactor vessels that contain tons of nuclear fuel and can grow brittle after years of being bombarded by radioactive neutrons. “They just get older and older,” he said. If the vessel gets brittle, it becomes vulnerable to cracking or even catastrophic failure.

Other concerns surround the durability of components such as concrete and electric cables, but an advisory board to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent government agency that gave Turkey Point the green light to operate into the 2050s, said those risks could be managed safely.

The commission’s decision doesn’t sit well with Philip Stoddard, mayor of South Miami, a city of 13,000 on about 18 miles away from the Turkey Point plant. He keeps a store of potassium iodide, used to prevent thyroid cancer, large enough to provide for every child in his city should the need arise.

“You’ve got hurricanes, you’ve got storm surge, you’ve got increasing risks of hurricanes and storm surge,” said Stoddard, 62. All of this not only increases the likelihood of a nuclear disaster, it also complicates a potential evacuation, which could put even more lives at risk.

Gabriel Ignetti, a 72-year-old Miami resident and retired music teacher, views nuclear power as a lesser evil than climate change and welcomes extending the life of the plant. “We have a climate emergency,” he said, “and if you have a climate emergency you can’t say we are not going to use that tool.”

That’s a point backers also highlight to make the case for extending the lives of nuclear power plants. Nuclear energy provides about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity and about 55% of the nation’s carbon-free energy.

Climate change is also one of the main cases against extending the life of Turkey Point, said Kelly Cox, the general counsel for Miami Waterkeeper, an environmental group that is challenging the NRC’s approval in federal court. New data show sea level rise in the area reach as high as 4.5 feet by 2070, but regulators from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission didn’t take those updated figures into account, Cox. said.

“They are going to be flooded,” Cox said. “If we are relicensing a major utility we need to be preparing for the impacts of sea level rise.”

Scott Burnell, a NRC spokesman, said the agency’s review process did take into account the most recent information available on sea level rise, but that “the projected rate of sea level rise and associated revisions in flood hazard are slow enough that the plants will have ample time to appropriately analyze and address possible future effects.”

Peter Robbins, a spokesman for Florida Power & Light Co. said the utility is addressing that problem using a series of pumps to decrease the salinity in the cooling canals. The main power plant and its critical component are elevated 20 feet above sea level and are protected by concrete and reinforced buildings designed to withstand hurricanes and floods.

“At the end of the day it’s a very clean, reliable source of electricity,” Robbins said. “More than anything we think this is a win for our customers. It helps keep their bills low, and there are no greenhouse gases as part of nuclear.”

In the city of Homestead, not far from the Turkey Point plant, Brian Goodwin, a 52-year-old farmer, said he supports the reactors’ extension. “I hope they build another one,” said Goodwin. “It’s good clean power.”

H-Canyon was constructed in the early 1950s and began operations in 1955.

The aging facility – 1,028 feet long, 122 feet wide and 71 feet tall – is the nation’s only up-and-running hardened nuclear chemical separations plant.

White last week described H-Canyon as an “extremely important facility to the United States” and as a “very precious resource.”

Wilson agreed, describing it as “just so critical for our country.”

The article goes on to discuss the plant needs repairs and upgrades, such as roof maintenance, and technology upgrades.
Link: https://www.aikenstandard.com/news/h-canyon-at-srs-poses-maintenance-challenge-doe-cleanup-chief/article_ecff0374-5f88-11e9-b58a-6b22c18d785d.html

The PHAI is based on community-recommended solutions for the cleanup and safe long-term management of approximately 1.7 million cubic metres of LLRW. It is currently one of Canada’s largest environmental remediation projects.”

What are the risks of this contaminating adjacent farmlands? It is a few kilometers south of Newtonville, Ontario – near the lakeshore. Additionally, what are the chances of it contaminating the lake – due to erosion rates?

More information can be found here: https://www.cnl.ca/en/home/environmental-stewardship/phai.aspx